Rethinking Holiness , livre ebook

Baker Publishing Group - A. Van De Walle Bernie

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

97 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

Holiness is experiencing a renaissance both within and beyond the church today. Based on years of conversations with students, this approachable theological introduction to the Christian doctrine of holiness challenges the commonly held idea that holiness is primarily a moral category. The author explains that holiness is grounded not in ethics but in the basic nature of God; it is essentially and exclusively a divine property. The book highlights the Bible's necessary and corrective role in defining holiness and shows how individual holiness is grounded in the community that is the church catholic.

Sujets

Philosophie et théologie

Christian theology

Informations

Publié par	Baker Publishing Group
Date de parution	14 mars 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781493409495
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0662€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

© 2017 by Bernie A. Van De Walle
Published by Baker Academic
a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.bakeracademic.com
Ebook edition created 2017
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4934-0949-5
Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com
“Bernie Van De Walle presents a readable, engaging, and theologically sound conversation that is absolutely necessary. Approaching a subject that has fallen out of popularity within the contemporary Christian church, Van De Walle offers a much-needed corrective to the misrepresentations of holiness that have arisen over the past several decades. By connecting the lines between God’s nature and God’s intention for creation, Van De Walle invites us to embrace the genuine liberty to participate in the divine nature and to be conformed to the image of Christ. He reminds us that holiness is neither something we achieve nor a matter of behavior—of being sinless—but is rather something God creates within individuals and the church. For pastors and theological educators who have lamented the current state of holiness among our parishioners and students, Rethinking Holiness provides an excellent resource for reigniting conversations about genuine holiness with those to whom we are called to minister.”
— Estrelda Alexander , William Seymour College
“Van De Walle has pulled off a small miracle: he has written a book of theology that’s also a page-turner. He has a gift for rendering complex ideas in lively prose with lucid arguments—and presenting it all as nourishment for the soul. In Rethinking Holiness he employs this gift on a topic the church urgently needs to rediscover: holiness. I am going to recommend this book widely in the hope that it reintroduces to the church (and to the world) the staggering beauty of God’s holiness and invites us again to delight in the good news that God shares God’s own holiness with us in order to makes us holy as God is holy.”
— Mark Buchanan , author of The Rest of God
“The message of holiness has been proclaimed throughout the centuries, though at times it has been distorted by legalism and misunderstanding. Bernie Van De Walle brings this important understanding of God’s character back into the center of conversation in the life of the church. Rethinking Holiness provides a necessary, contemporary expression of a vital doctrine.”
— Carla Sunberg , Nazarene Theological Seminary
“Van De Walle strikes at the heart of what God desires for the church and what Christians have always yearned for—holiness. He eloquently unravels the complex meaning of holiness and persuasively argues that Christians and non-Christians alike have a deep desire and need to be holy. Rethinking Holiness challenges those who have dismissed holiness as an antiquated and uninteresting topic to rethink their dismissal. This book offers deeply theological yet practical insights from a scholar who is passionate about helping ordinary Christians rediscover the essence of holiness.”
— Antipas L. Harris , Regent University; author of Holy Spirit Holy Living: Toward a Practical Theology of Holiness
For Jean, Bunty, Michael, and Deanie,
each of whom taught me the values of dedication, hospitality, and family,
and each of whom was gone long before I would have preferred
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Endorsements
Dedication
Preface
1. The Desire and Need for Holiness
2. A Biblical Definition of Holiness
3. A Theological Investigation of Holiness
4. Holiness and the Nature and Purpose of Humanity
5. Holiness and the Nature and Problem of Sin
6. Holiness and the Nature and Goal of Salvation
7. Holiness and the Nature and Goal of the Church
Conclusion
Notes
Index
Back Cover
Preface
A number of years ago, the president of my denomination, The Christian and Missionary Alliance in Canada, invited me to lead a seminar on the doctrine of holiness at one of our denomination-wide assemblies. At first I thought that he was simply seeking to have us tip our hats to our denominational heritage, a history related to the wider Holiness movement that grew out of the late nineteenth century. I fully expected that the seminar would be populated only by the “gray hairs” or those with an overdeveloped sense of historic obligation, which is to say that I expected the attendance to be small. After all, it seemed to me that the topic of holiness, even in those circles where sanctification has historically played a significant role, was out of fashion. Much to my surprise, there was a large turnout to the seminar, and many wanted to linger long after the allotted time to talk further and more deeply about holiness. Consequently, I proposed a course on the theology of holiness at Ambrose University, where I have served on the faculty since 1999. As with the seminar, I have been surprised to find enrollment in this course consistently about four times as high as any other elective course that I teach. This is true even though the other courses examine topics that would seem more provocative and popular than the topic of holiness. Together these experiences led me to conclude that there is a widespread hunger for knowledge and experience of the holy, even though it is often presented as being passé.
One of the major hurdles that I have encountered in teaching a course on holiness is a fundamental and popular misconception regarding the nature of Christian holiness. For the greatest majority of my students, holiness is understood to be a commodity, a lifestyle, or an ethic that one is expected to attain. My students thus assume that the course will be a how-to course designed to give them the steps or secrets to attaining holiness. Yet I have always been convinced that this is not the direction that the course should take but that students instead need to rethink their assumptions about theology before moving to practical matters. Thus we investigate the nature of Christian holiness. In time, students become intrigued and energized by the thought that holiness or “the holy” (as Rudolf Otto called it) is not primarily a code of conduct or kind of behavior but more basically a reference to God himself and only derivatively a reference to ethics. Rather than approaching holiness as a moral or legal category, we explore it as a divine, theological, or theocentric category. It has to do with God and what he is like. We can correctly understand the relation of holiness to ethics and morality only when we first understand it theologically.
This book is written out of that conviction. If the reader is looking for a how-to book or a book on ethics and morality, the market is replete with those. This book instead presents holiness as a category of theology proper. It is a “what-is” book. At the same time, rather than writing as if this were a highly technical theological treatise, I have written in a style that I trust will be more accessible to students, pastors, and the interested person in the pew. (Those who desire to dig deeper into this topic can consult my endnotes, which include the majority of my interaction with secondary literature.) My broader goal for the book is to aid the seeming renaissance of interest in holiness both inside and beyond the walls of the church.
To that end, I begin the book by identifying signs that indicate that there currently exists a broad desire and a great need for holiness. Somewhat surprisingly and perhaps counterintuitively, these signs can be found among Christians and among those outside the church. Yet, as I also discuss in chapter 1, a number of hurdles need to be overcome within the church and in wider society if holiness is to experience a true renaissance.
In the next two chapters I present a definition of holiness that is grounded in Scripture and Christian theology rather than in human intuition and reason. In chapter 2 I highlight some key insights from the Old and New Testaments and their surrounding cultural contexts—the ancient Near East for the Old Testament and the Greco-Roman world and first-century Judaism for the New Testament. Drawing from these insights, I conclude chapter 2 with my definition of holiness as the transcendence or absolute otherness that is basic to God’s being . In chapter 3 I unpack this definition theologically by providing a closer look at the nature of God. I acknowledge that the popular understanding of God’s holiness as moral perfection is true, but I argue that this moral aspect of holiness is secondary to the more fundamental aspect of transcendence. I then describe the relationship of God’s holiness to other aspects of his nature, or divine attributes. I conclude by arguing that, when rightly understood, holiness is properly attributable only to God. All other forms of holiness are derivative and constantly dependent on their relation to the absolute holiness of God.
In the next four chapters I consider how this understanding of holiness affects other central theological categories. Chapter 4 explores the relationship between holiness and theological anthropology, considering what it means theologically to be human, especially in light of the fact that humans are created in the imago dei , the image of God. I argue that since humanity is created in God’s image and since holiness is essential to God’s being, holiness must in some way be an essential characteristic of humanity. From this